Unstructured Finance

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It was a good third quarter for Wall Street profits and an even better one for employees: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley set aside another $7.6 billion in compensation during the period, with year-to-date pay for the average employee up 15 percent at Goldman and 3 percent at Morgan Stanley.

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All year the big money has been talking up one of the more intriguing trades to emerge from the housing crisis: buying up foreclosed homes in large scale and rent those out for several years and then unload them when the price is right. But questions about the so-called rent-to-own trade are being raised now that an early mover in the space, hedge fund giant Och-Ziff Capital, is looking to cash in its chips now and is abandoning the idea of operating foreclosed homes as rental properties for years to come.

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Two weeks of speechifying by the Dems and Reps has come to an end. Well not really–but the conventions are over. And for all the talk, there is one issue that got short-shrift–a solution to the nation’s still unfolding housing crisis.

Earlier I blogged about how the Libor scandal just isn’t getting me as worked up as it is for other journalists (see Joe Nocera’s column today in the NYT). It’s not that I don’t think allegations of market manipulation aren’t important. And this is nothing to take away from the groundbreaking reporting by my Reuters colleague Carrick Mollenkamp did on the matter back in 2008 while he was at the WSJ.

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It didn’t take long for the powerful voices on Wall Street to rise up in protest over an intriguing and controversial idea to condemn distressed mortgages through local government’s power of eminent domain.

So there’s this election this Sunday in Greece and everyone–who follows the markets–is all excited. But at the end of the day, the main reason people in the markets are all up in arms is because they want to know who will get paid, in what order and most important–how much. Sadly, there’s too little focus on whether the right people/institutions are getting paid; let alone issues of social dignity and the quality of human existence. Guess that’s what the markets are all about, right?